Startup One Health aims to match pets with clinical trials that could help people too

Posted on February 12, 2016

From FierceAnimalHealth: Ben Lewis was pursuing a dual degree in veterinary medicine and management from the University of Pennsylvania when he recognized a major problem in medical research: Millions of laboratory animals are sacrificed every year in trials of drugs that often end up not working very well in people. So last year he teamed up with his wife, Christina Lopes, to launch The One Health Company, which aims to recruit pet dogs and cats for trials of new therapies for diseases that are similar in animals and people.

Pets and people share a susceptibility to many diseases, including diabetes, congestive heart failure and several cancers. The One Health movement, for which the new company is named, is a global effort to bring together veterinarians and scientists who are developing new treatments for these conditions, in the hopes that pets will offer more realistic models of disease than lab rodents typically can. Any products that come out of such collaborations, of course, would also be able to be used in veterinary practice.